Senator Bacik calls for debate on Waste Management, and a debate on Rape Law

Order of Business

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Senator Ivana Bacik: I call for a debate on waste and waste management in light of the fiasco across Dublin City Council area resulting from the hand-over of the waste collection services to Greyhound, the lack of information to residents, the confusion over collection dates and the insistence by Greyhound on upfront payments, with the result that we may see thousands of households without bin collection services from this week onwards. The lord mayor, Councillor Andrew Montague, has already been on the radio and he is highly critical of Greyhound. The hand-over of services has proceeded seamlessly in other areas, notably in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, but in the Dublin City Council area it has been very poorly handled. It would be worthwhile to have a debate in this House on the more general issue of waste strategy and waste policy to examine whether this should be a function of officials or of elected representatives. As colleagues know, this was changed relatively recently and clearly there are difficulties with the current procedure where the council had voted against handing over the service to a private operator but the privatisation proceeded with the fiasco that ensued.

I call for a debate on rape law in light of very disturbing reports in the Irish Independent recently about a recent rape case in which certain comments were made by the judge and certain actions were taken against the complainant, the alleged victim, which resulted in a serious trauma being experienced by her. These are very disturbing reports and without going into the details of that case it requires that we re-examine how best we can reform our rape laws and trial procedures to ensure that complainants are not victimised a second time in the courtroom.